Book

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Kafka

Kafka’s famous proclamation: “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

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Nietzsche & Math & Mind

From the Arizona trip—Grand Canyon—2010img_1065

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.~Friedrich Nietzsche 

As quoted in The Puzzle Instinct : The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life‎ (2004) by Marcel Danesi, p. 71 from Human All-Too-Human

Nietzsche, it is said, went further into his own mind than anyone else had ever done or is likely to in future. It drove him crazy of course. And then I wonder, how would anyone know? No one could know, unless it is to be determined by what the thinker has written. A Buddhist monk has said that there are at least 30-some levels within the mind. At least that many that he had reached. And he had warned against attempting such a voyage, saying that madness lay in wait. The Grand Canyon of the mind, yes?

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Berger

 John Peter Berger, writer and art critic, born 5 November 1926; died 2 January 2017.johnberger

It’s his book that hides much of my author-photo face for The Fat Man. The rich family in the novel is also named for him: The Bergers. I don’t mean to imply that he lived a rich life. In reality it’s the opposite, a bit of irony. He was a Marxist and the family is monied and ungenerous. He in fact gave with abandon to the Black Panthers.

It is mostly impossible for me to read his books. I have had And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos for years now. I read a little and get so inspired-excited that I go off to write or to sketch or just think. (He goes nicely with some Glenn Gould piano.) Eventually I come back to the book and once again I only get so far…sometimes the book is so long to the side that I have to start over again. And how sweet to consume those first pages again and again.